CRYSTAL CHARLOTTE EASTON Excellent Frameworks Listening for my Grandmothersillustrations from a personal Legend My artworks arise as my personal responses to questions that need answering; Questions like, how do we heal our land, our families and communities? How do we go about restoring our lives to honor and protect our own inner child, or our child relatives, after we’ve endured generations of harm? How do we heal a brokenhearted mother or convince a youth dancing with suicidal
A Thriving Arts and Cultural Community thoughts that safety, beauty and joy are worth hanging around for? How do we soothe a fighting, flighting or freezing man? Mostly thoughI grapple with why we should do any healing at all… my art stirs and teases at the answers, while I reach and listen again for the wisdom of my grandmothers. They come to me in my visual language and I have to work at interpreting what I see. In September 2021, I joined the University of Toronto to study the Master of Social Work- Indigenous Trauma and Resiliency Program with Jane Middleton Moz and team- we were prompted to write a personal legend that describes lessons learned from Trauma in life so far, and the tools of Resiliency I’ve gained. I mostly draw
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from the ceremony work that my community does in our sweat-lodge; but I also collect wisdoms from caring for and listening to the elders in my life and from my own heritage and dream-walking practice (wherein I seek and receive conversations with my ancestors). I wrote the audio story featured in this show for my teachers, when asked to transform some of my learnings about Intergenerational Trauma and Resiliency into a story that demonstrates Resilience as medicine. It is a synthesis of common recurring threads that inspire and provoke me to feel alive, and these threads help me to remember that my own connection to my humanity IS the healing I have to offer. Each image has played a role in my development as a person. Each one is expressing a turning point when I understood for a moment what my grandmothers were trying to teach me, in my childhood and in my dreams. In my
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professional life as a support person for many projects and programs, I have found these lessons to be true again and again- and I am still learning, still listening. I hope you find some part of your own healing in these images and stories. May we all be free to tell our tales in safe and beautiful spaces. Excellent Frameworks, Home of the EJ Hughes Gallery, 115 Kenneth St., Duncan. www.excellentframeworks.ca
